In tracking the driverless vehicle trend for the last several years, one thing is very apparent: You can’t trust at face value what you hear from automakers and their tech affiliates about the progress they are making.

The path to fully-autonomous vehicles has many twists and turns. While investors need to be weary of the trend of overpromising and under delivering from some automakers, the estimates of how and when autonomous cars will flood the market get sooner and sooner.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers predicts that, by 2040, driverless vehicles will make up 75% of cars on the road.

But inside the engineering labs at universities, projections for fully-automated vehicles able to navigate complex metro traffic patterns will become reality much sooner, perhaps within the next decade.

In Orlando, Florida, for example, state universities, transportation agencies and the Kennedy Space Center have partnered with the city to begin testing of driverless cars.

One of several sites sanctioned by the Federal Department of Transportation, the effort includes construction of a small simulated city to test the vehicles before they’re put to the real test: driving autonomously on Interstate 4 or the Florida Turnpike.

Behind each major advance toward autonomous vehicles are smaller technological advances coming from major universities and tiny tech companies all over the world.

Innovations in virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, deep learning, optics, and ever-faster, smaller and more mobile and chip technology are emerging from all corners of the globe.

The market for self-driving vehicle technology is swelling, even beyond expectations made just a year ago that it would reach $100 billion by 2020.

But as it expands worldwide — and beyond cars to a wide variety of vehicles on land and sea — the market grows exponentially.

With big tech players — Google, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, etc. — partnering with automakers from Toyota to Ford, from Mercedes-Benz to Volvo, and across the board, a variety of vehicle platforms, with a different set of options and uses, are being developed.

Technological advances in specific areas, such as virtual reality or optics, are moving to market quickly. They are being introduced feature-by-feature each year in new model vehicles.

This isn’t some pipedream, moon-shot technology that you’ll never see in your lifetime. Driverless vehicles are more and more a reality…

On its corporate campus in Dearborn, Mich., Ford uses its automated ;Dynamic Shuttle; to move people around.

And in January, driverless buses arrived in Paris, France. The EZ10 buses are starting off slow, only covering a half-mile stretch connecting the Lyons and Austerlitz stations in the city, but, if all goes well the pilot program, it will expand later this year.

So I say: Forget what the automakers and engineers predict for this huge tech trend. It’s too strong to slow down.

I am holding to my prediction: By 2025, every major automaker will have driverless vehicles to sell.

And you won’t have to wait that long for chances at huge fortunes from this unstoppable trend.

Gerald Celente is founder and director of The Trends Research Institute, author of Trends 2000 and Trend Tracking (Warner Books), and publisher of The Trends Journal. He has been forecasting trends since 1980, and recently called “The Collapse of ’09.”

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